SecureStream: An intrusion-tolerant protocol for live-streaming dissemination

Peer-to-peer (P2P) dissemination systems are vulnerable to attacks that may impede nodes from receiving data in which they are interested. The same properties that lead P2P systems to be scalable and efficient also lead to security problems and lack of guarantees. Within this context, live-streaming protocols deserve special attention since their time sensitive nature makes them more susceptible to the packet loss rates induced by malicious behavior. While protocols based on dissemination trees often present obvious points of attack, more recent protocols based on pulling packets from a number of different neighbors present a better chance of standing attacks. We explore this in SecureStream, a P2P live-streaming system built to tolerate malicious behavior at the end level. SecureStream is built upon Fireflies, an intrusion-tolerant membership protocol, and employs a pull-based approach for streaming data. We present the main components of SecureStream and present simulation and experimental results on the Emulab testbed that demonstrate the good resilience properties of pull-based streaming in the face of attacks. This and other techniques allow our system to be tolerant to a variety of intrusions, gracefully degrading even in the presence of a large percentage of malicious peers.